This series is part of a project that investigates poetry translation as a correspondence between author and translator. For this translation, I took Marion Poschmann’s original poems and translated them in two ways: first by attempting to faithfully retain as much of the original content from the German version as possible; and then by writing new poems that directly responded to each of her texts. In this way, non-German-speaking readers gain insight into the German text through these two distinct vantage points. There is also a third sort of “translation” going on here: a visual representation of the translation act itself. Using various design elements, I attempted to show the movement and relationship between all three versions of each text, depicting a sense of call and response, as well as enforcing the notion of creative translation as an evolving form of interpretation.

Sharmila Cohen lives in Berlin, where she initially moved on a Fulbright Scholarship to investigate poetry in translation and now works as a freelance writer, translator, and editor. She is a co-founding editor of the translation press Telephone Books. Her work can be found in Harper’s Magazine, Circumference, and Epiphany, among other places.

German poet Marion Poschmann was asked to be this year’s lyrikline curator, tasked with selecting four German speaking poets to be recorded for the website in 2017. She will introduce her selections at an event at Haus für Poesie in Berlin on November 16, 2017.

lyrikline.org is celebrating its 10,000th translation: Broken down, there are exactly 4,607 translations into German and 5,393 translations into other languages; of those, 2,498 were from German originals and 2,895 from originals in other languages. This means that since its inception in November 1999, lyrikline.org has thus put just under 70 poem translations online per month.

At the end of 2011 we were able, thanks to a translation grant from the German Literature Fund, have more than 400 poems translated for lyrikline.org, of which two-thirds are translations into German and one-third translations of German poets into other languages.
Now the second half of these new translations are online too.

The main aims of lyrikline.org are to make poetry known across borders and between languages, to enable poets and poetry lovers to exchange ideas and to create access to contemporary poetry.The chief basis for achieving this is translation. Without translations, poetry cannot be read outside its own language area.
So we are especially pleased that the German Literature Fund has provided funding for the translation of more than four hundred poems for lyrikline.org, with two-thirds of these being translations into German and one third translations of German poets into other languages.
The first half of the new translations have already been placed on the website; the second half will be following during December.
This means that a great many poets can now be discovered in German translation probably for the first time, including Linn Hansén, Malte Persson and Fredrik Nyberg from Sweden, Tania Langlais, Dominique Robert and Paul Chamberland from Quebec and Canada, as well as Dragan Jovanović Danilov from Serbia, Maria do Rosário Pedreira from Portugal and Tone Škrjanec from Slowenia, to mention just a few.

Since the beginning of 2011 we added 600 new translations to lyrikline.org. Never before have we been able to upload so many translations in such a short time. We would like to thank all the translators, our international partners for their great work and the German ministry of foreign affairs for their support. A special thanks goes to the UNEQ, our partner in Quebec, who contributed 110 translations from Italian into French.